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Picture: Sadiel Mederos

By Ely Justiniani Perez (El Toque)

HAVANA TIMES – On September 22, 2021, Ministry of Tourism officers agreed to fulfill with three representatives from a large group of tour guides, who’ve mobilized to realize authorized standing for his or her work exercise in Cuba.

Regardless of there simply being three chosen representatives because of the “epidemiological state of affairs”, nearly all of the collective’s members agree that “the assembly will likely be a step ahead because the representatives will know how one can put the group’s pursuits on the desk, after having a well-articulated and inclusive discourse, which covers the numerous completely different pursuits of its members.”

The Tour Guides group for Authorized Standing as a Self-Employment Exercise has over 800 members, together with guides at state-companies, tour managers and self-employed guides with completely different schooling backgrounds. Their basic goal is “to advocate for the legalization of Tour Guides as a self-employment exercise and for authorized standing that enables them to work in an empirical method.”

Some causes to legalize the exercise

Ever because the exercise appeared on the checklist of banned professions throughout the personal sector, tour guides haven’t stopped of their mobilization to reverse this measure. On this regard, the Tour Guides group for Authorized Standing as a Self-Employment Exercise has undertaken key actions equivalent to offering arguments about the advantages of this self-employment exercise for the nation’s financial growth.

The promotion of tourism in Cuba has been highlighted as one of many factors on which the personal guides may have a powerful impression. “The nation wants much more than tourism to make progress, and if each self-employed information turned a publicist and confirmed all the good issues the island has to supply, this may result in a considerable improve within the variety of guests,” factors out Felix Ruano, a tour information with a few years of expertise.

“Guides everywhere in the island are preventing for this work to achieve authorized standing, and they’re burying themselves in work to create progressive and enticing merchandise to make sure tourism develops in lots of elements of the nation. The Authorities has spoken on many events about eliminating pointless unlawful actions and it is a clear instance of this,” Ruano emphasizes.

Debates over latest months have delved into the worth of impartial vacationer exercise as a supply of jobs and income for the nation, by way of taxes.

Arturo Mesa, a professor and translator with over 20 years of expertise within the discipline, factors out that “this type of employment may supply a fantastic number of tourism affords, by growing actions which might be tailor-made to traveler pursuits and by designing packages for small teams, for individuals who don’t wish to journey in massive teams like those that nationwide businesses usually function.”

“We would like the productive forces to really feel extra dedicated and motivated, and that all of us have the possibility to take part in nationwide progress,” Mesa underlines.

Negotiations in context

On February 10, 2021, the Ministry of Labor and Social Safety issued a listing of 124 financial actions banned in Cuba’s personal sector, and this included tour operator providers, in addition to journey businesses.

Up till this second, “impartial” tour guides function and not using a license or have been utilizing a license that allowed them to someway justify their relationship with small teams of vacationers. This skilled exercise had been in a authorized limbo, as there was no regulation that helps it, however there weren’t any legal guidelines to ban it both. Now there’s.

Because of these rules, heated debate broke out on social media between individuals who have been linked to the sector, who despatched dozens of letters to the corresponding our bodies. In addition they shared a web based petition to get authorized standing for personal journey businesses – over 1500 individuals signed the doc.

In response to those complaints, the Ministry of Labor and Social Safety wrote a written response to one in all its signatories, in Might of 2021. It said, “with the brand new Social/Financial Technique to push the nationwide financial system within the curiosity of encouraging native growth and the manufacturing linkages between the general public sector and personal types of administration, the Ministry of Labor and Social Safety, alongside the Ministry of Tourism, would analyze and assess the pertinence or not of the train of those actions and others regarding the tourism sector.”

Weeks later, on June 7, 2021, the Cuban Republic’s Official Gazette printed Decision 132/21 by the Ministry of Tourism (MINTUR), which is a brand new sequence of rules for “nationwide journey businesses”.

The doc defines nationwide journey businesses as “authorized individuals in Cuba, whose social mission is to hold out actions that consist in mediating between vacationers and tour operators”; and likewise explains that the authorization of those lies in MINTUR’s fingers.

Whereas the rules don’t explicitly state who can create these businesses, it acknowledges that pure Cuban individuals (the Self-Employed are pure individuals) may be “suppliers of tour providers” that supply “the sale of those in teams, packages, circuits, excursions or different vacationer providers” by way of State journey businesses. What is going to this relationship be like? It doesn’t say; however there’s little doubt that the dearth of readability in these rules can be a glimmer of hope for the extra optimistic.

Then on August nineteenth, to many individuals’s disappointment, the exercise of journey businesses and tour operators appeared on the banned checklist once more throughout the framework of decrees and resolutions that regulate personal sector enterprises (which embody micro corporations, non-agricultural cooperatives and self-employment). Thus, the battle for authorized standing continues…

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.

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